


she has fire in her eyes (and love behind them)

by lucylikestowrite



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:34:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5425781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucylikestowrite/pseuds/lucylikestowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are both immortal, but Clara is caught in a millisecond, and Me doesn’t say it, but she worries that the universe won’t like it, that if she spills a drop of blood, it will all come flooding out. In the ages she has lived through, she has felt the cosmos fighting against her existence - but she’s fought this long, and Clara is new, young and new and impossible and breakable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she has fire in her eyes (and love behind them)

The problem is, they don’t know exactly how Clara’s… condition works. They know that she is in between heartbeats, but they don’t know if she can still hurt, still bleed or break or die. Me, in her many, many years, has never known anyone in Clara’s position, which she re-iterates every time Clara questions this. Clara is unique, she says. An anomaly that shouldn’t have been allowed to escape Gallifrey, that wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for the Doctor.

They are both immortal, but Clara is caught in a millisecond, and Me doesn’t say it, but she worries that the universe won’t like it, that if she spills a drop of blood, it will all come flooding out. In the ages she has lived through, she has felt the cosmos fighting against her existence - but she’s fought this long, and Clara is new, young and new and impossible and breakable.

So when they travel, she wants Clara to be careful. But Clara isn’t. She is reckless and she runs in heels and she somehow manages to live her life to the fullest in the space of a heartbeat. Her smile never leaves her face as she sees the wonders for the first time, because there were so many things that she never got to see with the Doctor, things that Me is more than eager to show to her. And when her eyes light up, when she looks back at Me, eyes wide and wondering at the dying star, at the frozen planet, at the galaxy in the midst of its creation, something in Me’s stomach turns.

She’s just so full of life and joy, except when she thinks Me isn’t looking. That’s not to say that she’s lying in her wonder, she’s just not telling the whole story. She doesn’t want to go back, but she does. Me can see how the weight of what she is pulls her down. She feels guilty, she knows that she shouldn’t be alive, shouldn’t be doing what she is doing, running around time and space with Me - but she still does, because she has an insatiable need to see everything, to do everything, to learn every story and be able to tell it back, and so she keeps running.

She keeps running, eyes always bright when Me suggests somewhere new, and they just go. No-one is waiting for them (except the whole universe, but they forget that most of the time) and so they go where they want, and sometimes they help, if they can, and sometimes no-one needs help, sometimes they can just run and smile and see and learn and Clara does this thing when she’s listening to people that makes them feel like they’ve never had a better audience, and it’s beautiful.

Clara is beautiful. That much is undeniable. Some of the time Me finds herself wishing that her memory was unlimited. She knows that it would be agony, knows that it would be impossible and that she wouldn’t be able to cope, but she just wishes she could truly remember the first time she met Clara. Her books tell her enough: she knows what happened, she knows what the Doctor did and what Clara did and what she herself did, but she can’t remember how she felt. She wonders if she had butterflies in her stomach when she stood with Clara on the Mire spaceship, if she felt the same planning battle as she does when she watches Clara talking her way out of whatever sticky situation they’ve got themselves into.

She wonders whether she felt like her lungs had been ripped out of her chest when she saw the Chronolock on the back of Clara’s neck, in the same way she did when Clara fell off a cliff on one of the planets they visited, and only managed to hang on by their fingertips, before being Me was able to pull her up, agonisingly slowly.

She wonders when she started wanting to kiss her until she was gasping for breath, wonders if that is new or whether she’s always wanted that.

Because, God, she wants it so much now, and it doesn't seem like it can be new, it feels like it must have been burning inside her for centuries. She had told herself no attachments for so long, but with Clara burning so brightly, and the knowledge that her time is limited, that it has to end, it seems like it will be easier to let go, so she lets herself fall.

Me lets herself run behind Clara, being dragged along by the hand, Clara’s head whipping round sometimes to check that Me is still holding on, and she always is. She's older than anyone could imagine, tired, really, but Clara is so young that she feels young again just being around her.

And every day that she spends with Clara, every trip they take, every time they jump from one planet to the next, she falls in love more, until she finds herself finding it hard to move her eyes away from Clara, until Clara is the only thing occupying her thoughts.

And Clara doesn't see a thing. Or at least she doesn't show it. She doesn't notice the eyes fixed on her or the touches that linger. Her eyes are so ridiculously focused on everything she is seeing of the world that she doesn't notice anything close enough to home.

Oh, and it’s agony. Ever since the chip, pain that Me has felt has been fleeting, but this stays. It tears through her stomach, piercing her lungs, until she is sure she can’t breathe. It's horrible, but on the outside she is calm as ever. Her time alive has taught her the value of hiding emotions, at least, and so she is excellent at it.

Sometimes, at night, Clara weaves her way into Me’s dreams, her eyes bright and eager and, God, she looks so beautiful when her face is inches away from Me’s, and then she wakes up, gasping, the taste of Clara’s lips still in her mouth.

On those days, looking at Clara hurts more than usual, because it's not real, but she needs it to be so badly.

But it won't happen. Clara is still in mourning. She doesn't show it, but sometimes at night Me hears her crying, and it takes all she has not to go and comfort her, but she doesn't, because it feels private.

So she keeps loving from afar - or, as it is, sometimes achingly close: Clara likes tight spaces - and Clara remains oblivious. Clara remains so beautifully oblivious that it hurts. She flirts with everyone they meet, that smile always wide on her face, and Me watches as strangers fall in love with her, just for a few minutes, and she wonders if Clara knows that she leaves a trail of people behind her. Not in a bad way, of course, just these people who… who’ve seen a little bit of a sunrise and it’s lit up their whole life.

But Me is with her all the time, and it’s dazzling. She is every colour in a sunrise, she is the sun in the noon sky, dangerous to look at, and when shadows pass over her face, she is the sunset, muted tones but still brilliant.

And then something shifts. Me feels it. Something about Clara shifts, and she doesn’t know what it is until she realises she no longer hears her crying at night, realises that her face has changed when she talks to strangers - and then realises that her face has changed when she looks at Me.

\---

She doesn't do anything about it, for a while, scared she is going to break the fragile arrangement that they have.

And then they are almost captured by bounty hunters, and they learn that there is a price on the head of the girl with no pulse, that the Time Lords have sent people searching through all of time and space for Clara to bring her back and set time right.

They only just make it back to the TARDIS ahead of those pursuing them, slamming the door behind them. Clara stays, slumped against the door, and Me starts the TARDIS, setting their course for anywhere, anywhen. Me doesn't look back at Clara until they’re landed, a million light years and a billion years from where they were before, and when she does, Clara chest is still heaving, her back still pressed against the door of the TARDIS, and something in her eyes is wild when she focuses on Me.

And looking at her like that, Me is forced to face the fact that she almost lost her without doing anything about what she felt, that she almost had her torn away before she was ready, and it stirs something inside of her. So she does the only thing that feels right - she kisses Clara, hands either side of her face. She feels Clara start against her mouth, then fall into it, her arms around Me’s back, pulling her in closer, pressing further back against the door, and as Clara’s lips part, as their breath mixes, Me suddenly feels a need to be something more than what she has been for so long, to be something be again something that she used to be.

Their mouths move apart, and, as their foreheads touch, and Me moves her hand to brush over Clara’s collarbone, Clara’s eyelashes flutter and she breathes out a name Me had tried to forget, but from Clara’s mouth it sounds like a prayer. And Me is impossibly old, and so stubborn, but this woman knew her at the beginning and she can still remember the girl who died, and maybe that means something, after all.

So Me decides, as she kisses Clara again, as she feels Clara’s smile against her lips, that maybe she can be Ashildr again. Maybe, if Clara can kiss her like this, she can lay claim to a name that was hers and has always been, and she can be some of that girl again, even if she hasn’t been a girl for millions of years.

Most of the time she hates the fact that she is still a teenager to anyone who looks at her, but right now it is a reminder that she can be anything; that she is new and will always be new and can always change, even if she thought she couldn’t, and right now she feels infinite in the best way, ready to be Ashildr as long as Clara needs her to be.

**Author's Note:**

> this was kinda just a just a love letter from me to clara tbh


End file.
